In March 2021, Stephen Janak, a program specialist for Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, which provides research and training to growers across the state, drove across Texas, crisscrossing farm-to-market roads from Madisonville to Bandera. The previous year had seen a bumper crop of olives—the largest production year to date, the culmination of a decade-long boom in the Texas olive oil industry.But as Janak visited growers—as he did regularly to check on variety trials—he saw fields full of dead trees. Instead of the shiny, green, feather-shaped leaves that had filled orchards only a month before, he saw acres and acres of brown. Winter Storm Uri had just gripped the state in a brutal and unrelenting cold, breaking records for the longest below-freezing streak in the state’s…
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